On vacation until  July 8th...be back on line then!

“Rooting for the Titanic”

As a follow up to his essay about Ed Koch “cleaning up” Fifth Avenue, Leonard gives us a history of the famous shopping district…reminding us, ironically that the avenue connects Harlem to Greenwich Village. He makes the point that the avenue was built by “…stock-swindlers, price fixers, slumlords, politician-bribers, Indian killers, union busters, copper kings and anti-semites who had to be taught to eat with a fork.” The current denizens would probably fit into those descriptions as well.

He has a funny line about the rich and famous who lined the avenues (e.g. the Astors), “Their children went mad, or sank in the Titanic…while my potato-famine Irish grandfather was rooting for the iceberg.”

New word: lumpen = short for lumpenproletariate, Marxist term for those that will likely never achieve class consciousness.

New learning: “During the Civil War, draft rioters –a mod of people, your basic lumpen, who couldn’t afford a substitute to carry their swords into battle at Gettysburg- burned down the Colored Orphan Society at Forty-Third and Fifth.”

Fifth Avenue...A= The Center of the Universe, an coincidentally where the draft rioters burned the orphanage:

Making Fifth Avenue Safe For Our Only Mayor

“Crazy Eddie Sweeps the Streets”

I’m starting to get the feeling that John Leonard doesn’t like Ed Koch. Here’s the opening line of this section, “Our only mayor congratulates himself.” It’s a brief, blistering condemnation of Mayor Koch’s move to clear 5^th Avenue of illegal street vendors before the Christmas shopping season, costing $300K of police over time, while basically ignoring the “The crack dealers…on Eighth and Eighty-Seven every afternoon when school…lets out.” Leonard remarks that the street vendors are there for those who can’t afford to go in the pricey boutiques and department stores and “…lick the Gucci boots of the merchandise prince.” He recounts that the police confiscated “14,735 cubic feet of …gloves, umbrellas, coloring books, beaded ear rings, Maxell tapes, incense and falafel.”

Were there really still crack dealers on the upper east side and Maxell tapes for sales on the streets of NYC just 20 years ago...time flies.

Old word: Maxell tapes were used for recording music before CDs.

New learning: 14,735 Cubic Feet is approximately the size of Big Ben in London…this wasn’t in the essay, I just looked it up.

“There Are More Than Three Worlds”

A continuation of Leonard’s compare/contrast of Wolfe and Dissent and his spirited (and very sarcastic) attack on the power base of NYC for ignoring the real problems of real New Yorkers while celebrating the fiction of Wolfe and (as he sees it) Dissent condemning the welfare mother as a “parasite” for taking advantage of aid to dependent children. He is much more direct this time in his criticism of the Regan “counterrevolution” and mayor Koch (“Crazy Eddie”) who he sees as completely in bed with the big real estate developers and Wall Street moguls leading one side of a cultural war between the 3.5M tourists coming to see Times Square as “Disney World” and the 2.3M “newcomers” who have turned NYC into a “minority-majority.” He sends up Dissent (which he refers to as a novel) as more of an intellectual-left culture magazine than a force for change…and interestingly refers to Columbia as “…our favorite slum lord.”

Leonard has a passage about half way in that reads exactly like Charles Grodin’s character, Marty Blum, going to the White House to find some room in the federal budget for the imposter president in Ivan Reitman’s 1993 film Dave:

We might scrounge the money…$500MM in mysterious unspent revenues mostly from ‘Big MAC’, World Trade Center and Battery Park City surpluses…a half billion on capital gains tax…tax cooperative apartments…that’s another $60M…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoRHwIMYlbc (link to Dave clip)

In his call for this new approach Leonard writes, “We are talking about more than anybody now in power has the inclination or the guts to attempt. What we need is a change of philosophies and philosophers.”

New word: strophe and antistrophe = the first part of a Greek ode (…and the part that follows)

New learning: Commentary from December 9, 2008 NCPA:

Columbia University is buying up property in the neighborhood of Manhattanville, leaving it trashed and vacant, so that the area can be declared "blighted."  If that designation is made, the state will be able to take all the remaining well-kept property (property owners do not want to currently sell) in the area, hand it over to the university, and only then will Columbia clean up the mess.

It's a curious situation -- the government punishing a landowner who takes care of this property and rewarding an owner who does not.  But this is the through-the-looking-glass world of New York eminent domain law…

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=17341

“The ‘Delirious Professions’…Fear…(and)…Shoes”

The title comes from Paul Valery, early 20^th century French polymath (although best known as a French symbolist poet) to mean “All those trades whose main tools is one’s opinion of one’s self, and whose raw material is the opinions other have of you.” Leonard refers to them as the people that make the “…snow jobs and acid rain of our emotional weather.”  The essay is a sort of follow-on to his review of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire contrasting the tunnel blindness of both Wolfe and Paul Berman’s commentary on Bonfire in Dissent Magazine in 1991.

About the “delirious professionals,” Leonard writes, “Wolfe can’t get enough of them with his zippy…jazz fugue of the latest language” and Dissent “…isn’t interested in these people”…both catching a compelling but incomplete view of the First and Third World collision that was New York City in the late ‘80s and earl ‘90s.

New word: presbyters = priest (…then why not just say priest?)

New learning: Irving Howe (literary critic and socialist) used to refer to Senator Al D’Amato as “pickle head"....yes...I think I see it...

“Vanities”

Leonard’s quick review of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Maybe this was a TV commentary? After a short summary of the tension points in the plot, Leonard write, “Only Tom Wolfe could descend into the sears of the criminal justice system and find, for his hero, a white victim…Only Wolfe… [could] not notice the real-estate hucksters and homeless.” He calls the book a “surly whelp of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph de Maistre” and that “Satire means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how much there is for which you ought to apologize.”

Another example of Leonard criticizing the blurring of reality in literature to read like a gritty account, but skip all the real dirt. Although, he does end on an interesting note saying the “Wolfe can really sweat our sock.”

New phrase: Leonard coins the term “good-bones law firm” to signify a prestigious, old school law partnership.

New learning: Joseph de Maistre is a French philosopher and diplomat from the post revolution period. He is known for being a key figure in the “Counter-Enlightenment.” Who ever came up with that term for the movement needs to work on their branding.

Great photo on the cover of the 2002 Picador version of the book: